Jammy Up!

With the jammies covering her incision and the various tubes that are still going in and out of her, other than the betadine stains everywhere, she's starting to look more like a regular baby again.

Shrike is giving her a bottle of breast milk right now, and I think she'll probably head back to the hotel before long. I plan to nurse her for the 3 am feeding, and I think they'll make her get at least a couple more bottle feedings before I'm allowed to go back to just nursing.

I don't know if I've even mentioned this part, because I've been so focused on her recovery - but the doctors say that her holes seem to be completely closed.

Her heart function is not quite what they'd like to see (that's what made us think earlier that we would not be able to hold her this evening, after all) but that's kind of to be expected.

As explained by the nurse practitioner who is mostly managing her care, her right ventricle is used to being overfilled and no longer is, so it sort of thinks that it's underfilled and has to "tighten up" a bit, and her left ventricle is used to having to pump extra hard to get enough blood out to her body (because so much was being diverted to the other side) so it's kind of confused, too.

Basically, her heart has to learn to be normal, and that should take a few more hours. They are weaning her off of the medication that's helping with that, and hope to be done with it by mid-day.

As I said earlier, we are tired (much less so, since I slept for about 3 hours earlier this evening) but we are very relieved and very happy with how things are going, so far.